The
Swastika of a Nazi Childhood:
The First Symbol of Victimization
By Rebecca Phillips
Lakeland, Florida

"We are nothing. Mankind is all. By the grace of our brothers
are we allowed our lives. We exist through, by, and for our brothers who
are the State. Amen" (Rand 16). This prayer voices the creed of a
fictional people, but its philosophy has become the battle cry of very
real societies, and the results have proven disastrous. One such tragedy
takes form in the Holocaust of World War II.

Without a doubt the Holocaust claimed countless victims: Jews, Poles,
Gypsies, disabled, religious, political, and social dissidents. Most
students of the past ignore, however, the primary victims of the Nazi
movement -- the German children caught in the very center of the
collectivist fervor. The German people gain very little sympathy because
of their obvious role in the perpetration of the Holocaust, but
attention must be given to their motivation.

Ordinary, intelligent human beings grew into blind peons of the
state, and frighteningly ruthless and efficient killers, through the
misdirected powers of state education. To understand this transformation
better, one must examine the Nazi teachings and the students subjected
to it, as well as the philosophy and goals behind the curriculum, and
the degree of effectiveness it obtained. The results are sobering not
only because of their thoroughness, but because of their performance.
The historical process of Nazi indoctrination serves as a solemn example
of the power of education to not just one generation or one society, but
for many generations to come.

Hitler understood the principle that a child begins to take in his or
her surroundings from the moment of birth, so the most effective
education should begin as soon in a child's life as possible. For this
reason the Nazi Party, through the National Socialist Welfare
Organization (NSV), interested itself in prospective students even
before they were born, encouraging Aryan women to have children in or
out of wedlock. Young mothers expecting illegitimate children were
welcomed to luxurious state-run homes where they awaited the birth of
their contribution to Nazism. The babies were then brought up as
children of the state (Ziemer 32). These and other certified Aryan
youngsters attended a daycare or preschool until they turned six, when
the boys and girls separated into their respective schools. A young boy
became a pimpf, or "little fellow" until he reached the age of
ten, when he was initiated into the Jungvolk. When he turned fourteen he
again advanced to become a full-fledged member of the Hitler Youth, a
sort of secondary army, until he joined the regular army at eighteen.
The young girls became Jungmaedel (young girls) until they reached
fourteen, when they joined the Bund Deutscher Maedel (BDM), or League of
German Girls, until the age of twenty-one. At each stage of development
all children bearing the swastika must undergo an evaluation determining
his or her potential and achievement. "The Nazi schools are no
place for weaklings... schools are proving-grounds for the Party. Those
who betray any weakness of body or have not the capacities for absolute
obedience and submission must be expelled" (Ziemer 15). Teachers
spared little mercy for those who did not meet the requirements.

The curriculum Nazi schools taught cannot be found in a textbook, as
they did not use textbooks, but one can draw a fairly accurate picture
through witnesses' accounts and from the official teachers' handbook.
Dr. Bernard Rust compiled the Nazi philosophy and educational methods
into a manual whose title roughly translates Education and
Instruction, Official Publication of the Reich and Prussian Ministry of
Knowledge, Education, and National Culture. "Compared with the
educational methods in any country in Europe, Asia, or South America,
the theories promulgated in the first twenty-two pages of this book are
unique in spirit, content, and presentation" (Ziemer 15). The book
outlines a schedule emphasizing primarily physical education, and
including only those academics deemed important to the making of a
"good Nazi." The boys learned German, biology, science,
mathematics, and history. The girls learned little besides eugenics and
home economics-- they served solely to bare and raise children for the
Party (Ziemer 16). All academic classes had to be flexible to include
new Party-sanctioned views as they arose. For example, first the
Russians were enemies of the state, then they became allies, and then
enemies once again. Eugenics courses reflected such fluctuation
carefully. Geography classes studied parts of Europe as they became
significant in the war, while students concentrated on trajectory angles
in mathematics and explosives in chemistry. Everything the teachers
taught had some bearing in the war; all other information considered
useless. Of course, physical education claimed preeminence, and Party
celebrations and activities always held first priority over academics.

Hitler fully recognized the importance of the upcoming generation and
realized what an incredible influence education has on young,
impressionable minds. "Once the Nazis came into power in January
1933, they began the reforms that took one of the greatest educational
systems in Europe and turned it into a factory system, turning out
future defenders of the Reich..."( Ball and Heinz). The Reich
resembled a colony of ants, fueled by menial workers pouring out of the
schools. "The Fuehrer has decreed that the schools are to be the
nucleus of the Party. The Fuehrer has decreed that the children must
belong to him... that boys and girls must not be educated in the same
schools, since boys will become soldiers and girls will be mothers of
soldiers" (Ziemer 9). The schools did not hold forth even the
pretension of educating to empower the children, but blatantly declared
that their purpose was only to mold them into ideal servants of the Nazi
regime. "The fundamental principle to keep in mind is that we are
not striving to inculcate as much knowledge as possible into the minds
of our students. If students have learned to submit to authority, if
they have developed a willingness to fit into that particular niche
chosen for them by the Party, then their education has been
successful" (Ziemer 21). The schools maintained very careful
conditions to achieve this goal. They made sure that the children were
constantly exposed to Nazi doctrine and loyalty from the time they first
opened their eyes to gaze on the world. The only books available to
students were Nazi-authored volumes dripping with the glory of the Nazi
party, and only the most thoroughly impassioned Nazis could obtain
positions as teachers. The Nazi swastika haunted their vision, plastered
everywhere from the bands on their arms to the classroom walls to the
covers of their books. One woman recalls a class of Jungmaedel.
"'Myfriends are German,' exclaimed the teacher, Frau Braun,
at the top of her voice. With the class of nine-year-olds shrieking back
her words, she continued to yell out, 'Gypsies and Jews are not German!
Gypsies and Jews are not my friends!' I saw my usually mild-mannered
teacher change drastically before my eyes when she started reciting this
Nazi propaganda lesson" ("Section VIII. Discrimination against
children and in schools"). During school hours the children sat
under pointedly racial teaching and learned the art of war. After school
and on weekends they played organized, compulsory "games,"
acting out mock battles and spy campaigns, so that they spent every
waking moment steeped in Nazi propaganda.

The methods and principles of the Nazi educational system, undeniably
heinous as they are, become even more frightening when one examines just
how effective they have proven. The children, unacquainted with any
other outlook, emulated the Aryan furor with the enthusiasm unique to
the young. When questioned about their ambitions in life, the young boys
would unabashedly announce that they would serve the Fuehrer, go to
Paris and drop bombs, shoot the ugly Englishmen, and save Germany from
the evil Jews. Their morals were so distorted by "scientific"
racial lessons that they could feel no guilt for killing their
"inferiors"; it was only their duty. Girls also took in their
lessons in eugenics and motherhood. Encouraged by the Party's call for
more Aryan children, they displayed a fierce pride for illegitimate
pregnancies and attacked all who dared to protest this immorality.
Watching these children absorb the demented views of their teachers
prompted one witness to write, "All children are defenseless
receptacles, waiting to be filled with wisdom or venom by their parents
and educators. We who were born into Nazism never had a chance unless
our parents were brave enough to resist the tide and transmit their
opposition to their children" (Goldhagen 597). Such parents were
few and even then the government could, and often did, intervene and
remove children from homes where the swastika was not revered.

The legacy of collectivism and methodical racism continues to
influence Nazi children and Germany today. While many of the German
students died in battle as Hitler destined them to, many others
survived, and still bear the burden of hate fifty years after the
Holocaust. These survivors have taught the next generation the doctrines
of racial collectivism and the curse lives on, and will live on until
the cycle is broken. Today neo-Nazi groups patterned after the original
Hitler regime are springing up in Germany and all over the world
(Eaton). Over 70,000 Skinheads in thirty-three countries and six
continents still bear the swastika ("ADL Survey Analyzes Neo-Nazi
Skinhead Menace and International Connections"). Anti-Semitic hate
crimes abound, and the "scientific" basis for discrimination
is hard to dispel. Germany still faces the challenge of undoing such
deeply imbedded damage. "...The reconstruction of German education
meant that the Germans had to overcome both physical and spiritual
devastation" (Hobbes). The few scholars who survived the Nazi era
untainted by its hate struggle to build a new society out of its ashes.

State education in Nazi Germany serves as a sobering example of how
individuals can be trained into servile beasts and how deeply one
generation can affect the rest of the world. Aryan children taught the
principles and means of war and soaked in Nazi propaganda fulfilled both
the needs of the Nazi government to achieve its purposes, and the
assurance the Nazism will continue beyond the Third Reich. Thus to the
list of the triangles, badges, and stars the Nazis used to identify
their victims, one might also add the bold swastika every Aryan child
was forced to wear. "There is no proposal outrageous enough but
what its author can get a respectful hearing and approbation if he
claims that in some undefined way it is for 'the common good’"
(Rand vii). Every generation must learn from the German tragedy
to revere the individual being above any external bonds or bodies. All
nations must learn to count their children as sacred and use education
not to subdue, but to empower and liberate, for the future, indeed,
rests in the hands of the youth.

"Section VIII. Discrimination against children and in
schools." A Documented Reference Guide to Intolerance &
Discrimination Against the Scientology Community in Germany Today.
The Human Rights Department of the Church of Scientology International.
23 March, 1999. <http://hatewatch.freedommag.org/press/eng/gen/dscr/page33.htm>.

Ziemer, Gregor. Education for Death: The Making of the Nazi.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1941.

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